Weekly Readings Newsletter

An excerpt from John Main OSB, "I Am as I Am," WORD MADE FLESH: Recovering a Sense of the Sacred through Prayer (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2009), pp. 40-41.

[I]f we can only learn the humility, patience and fidelity to say our mantra we can enter fully into everything there is. This is the present-ness of the mystery of God, who is, who is now, who is always, who is all.

An excerpt from John Main OSB, MONASTERY WITHOUT WALLS: The Spiritual Letters of John Main (Norwich: Canterbury, 200), pp. 127-28.

The gift of vision is the wonder of creation. We are empowered to see the reality within which we live and move and have our being. It is not a gift we can ever possess because it is one we are continuously receiving.

We ask, “What is spirit?” and we find it less and less easy to answer. It would be easier to answer if one could make a clear opposition between those different aspects of our being, the aspects we encounter daily, in our relationships and in our reflection on the mystery of life, the dimensions of body, mind, and spirit. [. . . ]

As long as you think you can do just enough meditation to get by or enough to achieve something, you have not really begun to meditate. When you realize that you have started a journey that will last until the end of your life, you have begun to learn.

Today the pace, uncertainty and huge interconnectedness of the global tipping points—from food, soil and water to biodiversity and financial systems---confront us with the need for what Simone Weil called “a new holiness” as necessary to the world today as “a plague-stricken town needs doctors.”